EE Training Workshop
From SPARK
One-sentence summary
EE Training Workshop provides culturally appropriate training in personal evangelism that is biblical, adaptable, portable, and personal.
Description
Evangelism Explosion People Group Services (PGS) is an interagency multicultural collaborative initiative that has resulted in training events for discipleship in personal evangelism primarily through person-to-person conversation. The objectives are for trainees to become comfortable at:
- Personal Evangelism — using a beginning strategy that is biblical and culturally appropriate for sharing their faith using vernacular Scripture to make a clear and natural presentation of the gospel which makes sense to people of that culture;
- Discipleship — in showing others how to share their faith, thus resulting in indigenously sustainable multiplication.
Aside from achieving the above-stated project objectives, some workshop participants usually come to understand for the first time the meaning and significance of God's grace for them in Christ. Some pastors have testified that it was through these workshops that they truly came to saving faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
This training is meant to be a launch mechanism. There are as many ways to share the Good News about Jesus as there are people and situations in which to converse. EE PGS training focuses especially on personal conversation as something that complements any other "method" of sharing the Gospel. Trainees come to have a clear understanding of salvation by faith in God's grace to us through Jesus alone, and they learn to communicate this in clear, natural, biblical, and Christ-centered ways that make sense to non-believers.
Considerations
One of the most important aspects of the training is learning how to utilize the stories. It's one matter to learn to tell a Bible story well, but it's a completely additional matter to learn how to effectively utilize the stories. Most Christians are familiar with these stories, but it is of great importance to learn to utilize them well for the process of personal evangelism, and that is what our training focuses on.
This strategy has proven to be very useful on its own, but we encourage end users to integrate it into a larger strategy with Chronological Bible Storying and with other kinds of ministries such as community development, counseling, visiting the sick, etc. Although not every Jesus-follower will become a master Bible storyteller with a large repertoire of Bible stories, learning these Bible stories — and how to utilize them — is a very practical and helpful beginning for the average believer who lives within a storytelling culture.
Limitations
These workshops are designed for use with people groups that have a primary religion background.
EE People Group Services is partnering with EE national movements as well as with church leaders and other organizations to develop services, tools and training for sustainable indigenous multiplication of personal evangelism and discipleship among people groups worldwide. We also partner with others to facilitate cross-cultural training that will in turn facilitate in-culture training and evangelism.
Our 2007 and 2008 workshops have featured a Bible storying approach to both training and evangelism, and the primary audience has been people groups with a primal religion background. Although our major training projects for 2008 are in Central and South America, we are also partnering with others to developing services, tools and training for peoples of 10/40 window religious backgrounds.
Information is available on the Evangelism Explosion International website. (Currently only available in Spanish, although there is an English interview under "Entrevistas").
Guidelines for Use
Intentionally building friendships with non-Christians, knowing how to share our own personal story of the difference Jesus has made in our life, communicating the Gospel in clear and natural ways that make sense to the non-Christian, and discipleship that addresses the significant issues of one's life in a vital way, are strategic to personal evangelism that leads to true life transformation.
These workshops are different than traditional EE clinics, and are carried out in partnership between specially trained PGS personnel and one or more host organizations. The partnerships include sharing in organization, funding, research, strategy and materials development, testing, implementation, revision, and follow-up. See the list below for characteristics of the workshops and the strategy used.
When beginning for the first time in a given people group or region, there is a preliminary research phase followed by a workshop that focuses on training a "content development team" (CDT). This team consists of nativespeakers and others who have intimate knowledge of the culture, and who want to learn to develop the vernacular-specific EE PGS strategy for their people group. This team becomes the first generation to put the witnessing strategy into action and also to train a second generation who in turn will train others. Eventually the CDT develops written, audio, and video training materials for their people.
Rather than being merely a class on evangelism, PGS workshops are designed to be a discipleship experience with active participation by all trainees. Demonstrations and practice sessions are rounded out with actual in-community experiences in which trainers help participants learn to integrate their witness for Christ into the kinds of conversations that are normal in life. The primary learning strategies used are demonstrations, discussion, practice, and actual implementation. It is usually common that a significant number of people become Jesus-followers as a result of the implementation experiences.
EE People Group Services bases its services, training, and tools on prayerful and directed research. This impacts our expectations for what shape the training and personal evangelism will take for a given people group or region.
Select Details about the Training
The basic end-user training begins with modules about building friendships and how to share what God has done in our lives in a way that makes sense to the non-believer. The participants then learn to use five Bible stories as a means of sharing the Gospel. Although our normal expectation is that telling these narratives will take place over the course of multiple conversations, we have seen that it can also be done in a single conversation; participants learn to assess the readiness of the non-Christian to hear more of the story.
A premise of the basic workshop is that every Jesus-follower can and should learn to share his or her faith in a clear and natural manner, and should also be able to show someone else how to do this as well. In keeping with that, and in order to have a practical starting point, trainees learn a Good News narrative sequence such as the following (this is what we are using in 2008 in Latin America; this may change in the future and in other environments):
- God created people to have a friendship with him. (Summary from Genesis 1-2).
- People broke that relationship and were separated from God. (Summary from Genesis 3).
- God desires to forgive and restore the relationship. (The parable of the rebellious son in Luke 15:11-24).
- Jesus Christ died to pay the penalty for our sins and rose to offer us a restored relationship with God now and forever. (Summary of Mat. 28:1-9: Lk. 7:22; Jn. 19:1-38, 20:1-10).
- God requires that we respond with true faith in Jesus. (Summary of Jn. 20:19-29).
Additional training events are offered in discipleship, responding to difficult questions, and select life issues (currently, alcoholism and addictions).
Where to Obtain
Link to Producer or Source Organization
Evangelism Explosion International
Cost
Producer/Owners
Author/Artist/Producer
Current copyright owner
Evangelism Explosion International
Other Information
STATEMENTS OF VISION, MISSION, AND CORE CHARACTERISTICS
EE Vision Statement:
Every nation equipping every people group and every age group to witness to every person.
EE Mission Statement:
To glorify God by equipping believers in and through local churches to multiply through friendships, evangelism, discipleship, and healthy growth.
EE People Group Services Mission Statement:
Partner with EE entities and others to provide services, training, and tools for sustainable indigenous multiplication toward EE's vision and mission.
EE People Group Services Core Characteristics:
• Biblical, Christ-centered — We are a training ministry that is all about leading people to a vital relationship with Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. Contextualization and relevancy are never to define what is biblical, but rather are to be expressions of it. Grace-based salvation in Christ, and a grace-focused witness, are emphasized in all aspects of the ministry.
• God-Dependent — Our prayer, planning, expectations, and the manner in which we carry out the activities of ministry are to demonstrate intentional God-dependence. Conversion and transformation are God's work and require his timing and power; we are his servants who make ourselves available, prepared, and prayerfully seeking opportunities to witness.
• Research-Based Innovation — We do not mechanistically assume that what worked well in one culture will necessarily work well in another culture, but through research and methodical innovation seek to develop strategies that make great sense in a given people group, and that are indigenously reproducible and sustainable, including for people groups with little academic preparation or who do not function according to dominant culture.
• New Harvest Field Focused — Rather that duplicate work where EE is already effective, we focus on the needs for personal evangelism in new harvest fields. This primarily includes cultures where people are steeped in non-western belief systems, worldviews, and life-way presuppositions that impact every area of life. Given the global mobility and heterogeneous makeup of societies in today's world, we recognize that new harvest fields are no longer strictly determined by geography, but may be in places where they weren't 10 or 20 years ago, including in one's own neighborhood.
• Pervasive Partnership — At the entity level, we seek to network and partner widely in a variety of ways that are congruent with our organizational vision and mission as part of building up the Body of Christ. At the personal level, experienced trainers work side-by-side with trainees to mentor and coach them, and all trainers and trainees are required to have two people who actively pray for them and with them about their EE training and ministry.
• Indigenously Sustainable Multiplication — Every trainee is to be enabled to multiply organically, following the leading and enabling of the Holy Spirit, and to train others to do so. "It is better to teach a man to fish that to give him a fish."
• Indigenous Responsibility — The ministry in each country is enabled to become self-managed, self-supporting, self-propagating in contextually appropriate ways, and to function as a respected peer in the international network of EE national movements who assist one another toward becoming all that God has called each one to be.
• Real World Experiential Training — Rather then being yet another classroom course in evangelism —which is usually not an appropriate learning strategy for most of our target audiences— our workshops intentionally de-emphasize information-intensive lectures focused on written materials, and instead favor a cycle of observation and discussion of demonstrations, imitation and practice, and "On-the-Job Training" (OJT) that pairs up trainers and trainees in a comfortable growth path.
• Friendship — Jesus was a "friend of sinners," so we seek to instill in our trainees vision and wisdom for developing relationships in which they demonstrate true love and respect for those who have not yet come to know Jesus.
• Integral to Life — Witnessing is to be a normal part of the Christ-followers life-style rather than restricted to prescribed contexts, and our training is to model and facilitate this.
• Personal and Conversational — Rather than evangelism as a "canned" pre-packaged strategy, we seek to prepare trainees to address the issues that are significant to those they are talking with, and to assess a person’s spiritual status in a helpful way. They also learn to share about what God has done in their own lives in ways that make sense to others and that attract people to Christ and the Gospel. Multiple conversations are the expected norm, although trainees are prepared also to be ready to take advantage of spontaneous single conversation opportunities. "Personal" includes seeking to win entire families to Christ, especially in those societies that are strongly oriented toward family unity in decision-making, rather than the individualistic North American approach that targets and even extracts individuals at the expense of losing whole families.
• For Everyone — We serve churches, organizations, and individuals of all denominations, and from all cultural and educational backgrounds. Recognizing that in many cultures a defensive attitude toward personal power and guarding one's territory of authority in the Church is very problematic, we emphasize that personal evangelism is the opportunity and responsibility of both leaders and laity.
• Incremental Learning — Trainees begin by learning with a very simple, Bible-based, Good News conversational strategy that enables them to immediately begin sharing their faith in a clear and concise manner that others can also learn, and that can then be built upon and adapted in an infinite variety of ways. Various levels and types of additional training are offered.
• Follow-up — Trainees receive on-going follow-up that includes visits by trainers to the trainee’s local situation. Trainees also learn to follow-up on new believers.
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